Au bout du rouleau

CANADA | DOCUMENTAIRE | 125 MINUTES | 4K | ANGLAIS AVEC STF
DATE DE SORTIE : 9 DÉCEMBRE 2022

Au cinéma le 9 décembre 2022

Un film de Michael Zelniker

« Ce qu’on fait à la terre. C’est à nous qu’on le fait. »

Au bout du rouleau – une histoire d’amour boréale documente l'histoire peu connue et essentiellement non racontée de la forêt boréale, des Premières Nations qui y vivent et de sa coupe à blanc pour la fabrication du papier hygiénique. La protection de cette forêt est un impératif existentiel pour la survie de l'humanité.

Raconté avec les voix des aînés et des chefs des Premières Nations de la région boréale, de scientifiques et activistes réputés, Au bout du rouleau invite nos conteurs à parler avec franchise des problèmes auxquels nous sommes tous confrontés, et à démontrer que la solution réside dans la reconnaissance, le soutien des connaissances et de la gouvernance des communautés autochtones, qui sont enracinées dans un lien séculaire avec la forêt boréale et les arbres qu'elle abrite. Plus de 600 communautés issues des Premières Nations vivent de manière durable dans la région boréale depuis des milliers d'années.

La forêt boréale est essentielle à notre survie, car elle est la plus grande forêt encore intacte sur la planète Terre, elle stocke plus de carbone que tout autre paysage terrestre et elle contient la plus grande source d'eau douce avec ses innombrables lacs, rivières et zones humides. Elle est le principal habitat des oiseaux d'Amérique du Nord - environ 2 milliards d'oiseaux s'y nichent chaque année et jusqu'à 5 milliards migrent vers le sud à l'automne. Elle abrite des espèces emblématiques comme le caribou, l'ours, l'orignal et le loup, dont beaucoup sont en voie de disparition en raison d'une exploitation industrielle extractive sans entrave.

L'industrie forestière, principalement pour alimenter les entreprises américaines de produits de consommation, coupe à blanc les derniers paysages forestiers anciens et intacts pour que nous puissions nous essuyer les fesses avec du papier hygiénique toujours plus doux et plus coussiné.

Au bout du rouleau est raconté de manière puissante et émouvante par un groupe exceptionnel d'aînés et de leaders des Premières Nations, de scientifiques et de militants, dont la sénatrice Michèle Audette, la Dre Suzanne Simard (auteure de Finding the Mother Tree), feu l'aîné Dave Courchene (fondateur de Turtle Lodge), Valérie Courtois (Directrice exécutive de l'Initiative de leadership autochtone), et le Dr Nigel Roulet (Auteur des rapports du GIEC des Nations Unies), qui partagent leurs histoires, élevant leurs voix dans un cri unifié :

La forêt boréale doit être protégée et conservée.

In April 2020 I became aware that large intact, old-growth forest landscapes across the Canadian boreal are being clear-cut for the manufacture of toilet paper. These existentially important forests, which we literally depend on for our very survival, are being cut down so we can wipe our bums with softer, more plush toilet paper. Is there a more obscene illustration of what's gone wrong?

Having grown up in Montreal, spending summers 100 miles north of the city on the southern edge of the boreal, feeling deeply bonded to these forests and trees, I felt compelled to learn more.

After countless hours of research, and dozens of hours on zoom, I came to believe that the little-known, largely untold story of the boreal must be told. Perhaps the most important insight I had was that any story about the boreal must place the Indigenous Peoples of the boreal front and center. It's home to more than 600 First Nations communities - lands and waters they've lived and thrived on for thousands of years.

Flying from my home in Los Angeles to Vancouver, during COVID, quarantining for 14 days, before embarking on a 42-day/12,000-mile journey, from coast to coast, meeting with more than 50 First Nations Elders and Leaders, prominent scientists and conservationists, all of who opened their hearts and shared their stories, ending up in a remote part of Northeastern Quebec at an Innu gathering, before returning to Los Angeles with 125 hours of interview, landscape and wildlife footage.

What began as a story about trees and toilet paper evolved and emerged into a much deeper story that takes us from trees to toilet paper to treaties, from carbon to climate change to caribou to colonization, from water to birds to Indigenous knowledge/stewardship to the way forward. The boreal is an epic landscape that demands a very large canvas.

THE ISSUE WITH TISSUE has transmuted from just another movie about eco-destruction into a critically relevant story about the horrifying impacts and legacies of colonization, the Indian Act, residential schools, and the other atrocities that the Original Peoples of Turtle Island have endured at the hands of settler governments and how all of it was done in the service of unfettered extractive industrial exploitation.

"What we do to the land, we do to ourselves." I have come to understand that the larger systemic issue we are going to have to confront and reconcile is the one of disconnection. Disconnection allows us to do things like colonization. Disconnection allows us to go into wild spaces, and exploit the resources, without any care or concern for how we're impacting the rest of creation. Disconnection allows us to throw away our children's future, in service of satiating selfish, greedy, temporal needs.

As Elder Dave Porter says, "when we're in a forest, among the trees, we're with our ancestors, our Elder relatives. The trees are talking to us, telling stories of life. The question is, are we listening?” Through the process of photosynthesis, trees breathe out oxygen, and we breathe in that oxygen. We exhale carbon dioxide, trees inhale that carbon dioxide. Can there be a more mutually beneficial relationship? Were it not for these forests and trees, we wouldn't be here - our very survival depends on trees and plants.

Dr. Suzanne Simard, in "Finding the Mother Tree", speaks of her decades-long research into the subterranean, mycorrhizal networks that exist in forests, that these collaborative, cooperative, mutually supportive relationships between the trees, the fungi, the mosses and plants are what have allowed forests and trees to strive and thrive for millions of years. Trees have been on Planet Earth much longer than we humans, surely they have something to teach us about longevity and sustainability.

Perhaps the trees and our Elder Ancestors are talking to us, perhaps they are guiding us to understand: The way forward is not through survival of the fittest and competition to death but through cooperative, symbiotic, mutually supportive relationships. As Elder AJ Felix says, "let's be family again, let’s be relations again, let’s love each other because when we love, we respect and we look after each other.”

This theme of interconnectivity ties all the elements together encouraging us to realize, we are all connected, and we are all family. As Joni Mitchell says in her iconic song, "Woodstock" which we adapted for the closing of our documentary, "we are star stuff, billion-year-old carbon". We are all made up of the same elemental DNA, the same primordial soup that those who call Planet Earth home, literally have emerged from. In fact, we are all related, we are all family, and we do all come from the same stuff, the same Mother Earth.

And the sooner we embrace and embody this ideal, the sooner we are going to find our way out of the existential crises that we have created, that confront us today, threatening human survival and the survivability of the rest of creation that we share Planet Earth with.

Les aînés, les leaders et les communautés des Premières Nations d'un bout à l'autre de la région boréale

– ET –